


Accepting Family

by justalittlegreen, PrairieDawn



Series: Extended Meatballverse [10]
Category: MASH (TV)
Genre: Awkward Conversations, Domestic, Meatballverse AU, Multi, Period-Typical Homophobia
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-30
Updated: 2020-12-30
Packaged: 2021-03-11 03:28:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,745
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28418388
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/justalittlegreen/pseuds/justalittlegreen, https://archiveofourown.org/users/PrairieDawn/pseuds/PrairieDawn
Summary: Daniel Pierce meets the Hunnicutts and confronts Hawkeye about their relationship.
Relationships: B. J. Hunnicutt/Peg Hunnicutt/Benjamin Franklin "Hawkeye" Pierce
Series: Extended Meatballverse [10]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1100532
Comments: 14
Kudos: 46





	Accepting Family

**Author's Note:**

> Set on December 29th, 1951 (local dating system)

The kitchen was in disarray. There was cake on the table, cake on the chair, and cake on the floor. There was also a lot of cake all over Erin, but BJ had scooped her out of the chair by the armpits and hurried her off to the bathtub, closely followed by Peg, who scrupulously picked bits of cake and frosting up as they fell off their very sticky one-year-old and onto the carpet runners lining Hawkeye’s dad’s floor and stairs. Hawkeye pulled a rag out of the drawer beside the sink, wet it, wrung it out, and turned back to the confectionary carnage, wondering where best to begin.

“Just take a hose to it.” Daniel stood in the kitchen doorway, a small smile playing across his lips. “I’m reminded of the old days,” he added, coming in to help. He stationed himself at the sink, letting Hawkeye stack the plates and cups next to him as he filled the basin with hot water. “You were an absolute devil when it came to desserts.”

“Best part of the meal,” Hawkeye quipped. He decided to start from the top down, pulled back the chair, avoiding the messy spots on the floor, and leaned over to wipe down the tabletop. “Can’t blame her though. Covering yourself in cake is practically a first birthday tradition. She’s getting big so fast,” he mused. “She’ll be walking within weeks, I think.”

“Could be.” Daniel’s voice was noncommittal. They could’ve been talking about a patient in his office. “Going to be a talker, too, looks like.”

“Going to be a climber,” Hawkeye added. “You want to have a look at the goodies we brought from Geneva?" He finished the first pass at the table, shook out and rinsed the rag by his dad’s side, and turned back to get the chair. The four of them had arrived the day after Christmas, flying out of Oklahoma City after spending the holiday with Peg’s family, and would have another week to enjoy the picturesque Cape Cod house and surrounding woods before BJ and Hawk were expected back to coordinate with the medical liason in Switzerland.

“Sure,” Daniel said after a moment, putting the last of the dishes in the rack. He followed Hawkeye into the living room.

Hawk pulled out a leather satchel and lay his belated Hanukkah gifts on the table for his dad. He’d made sure there were eight of them, though it had meant some of them were small, much in the way his mother used to turn a single pair of socks into a gift. “I wasn’t sure what would be the most use to you out here,” he said, half apologetically, running a hand back over his hair and feeling silly and suddenly very young. 

“Tell me about them,” Daniel said. He had a doctor’s eye for tools, but none of these looked particularly familiar.

“Well, this isn’t really a medical device, it’s just for pictures.” He handed his dad the photo cube. “Tap the top and the image changes.”

Daniel took it and tapped his way through a dozen photos of Hawkeye, scenic spots in Geneva, the Hunnicutts, and a few of his colleagues, human and otherwise, his expression shifting from delight to puzzlement and back. When he set it down, his brows wrinkled for a moment with what might have been worry, though that made little sense.

Hawk should have asked then, but instead, he set a silvered package on the end table in front of them. “This is hemostatic gauze. You pack a wound with it, it will stop the bleeding like that.” He snapped his fingers for emphasis. “I brought three rolls. Good for farming accidents, that sort of thing.” Next to the gauze, he placed a small black box and opened it. “These were the safest, most useful, and easiest to use of the new drugs we’re trying out. They’re all shelf-stable for two years. Dosages on the vial, details in the box insert. This one is Tri-Ox. Use it when you want to manage acute hypoxia. It increases the ability of the blood to carry oxygen to the tissues.” He looked up to see if his dad was paying attention.

Daniel’s face was furrowed in intense concentration, contemplating the vial of Tri-Ox. He looked up when Hawkeye paused. “Son,” he said, “do you realize that this is like going back to the Civil War and offering them some penicillin?” His voice held wonder and wariness equally. “Follow the trail of likely outcomes,” he continued, his voice shaking, “and many people who might’ve otherwise died, wouldn’t have.” 

“Isn’t that the point?” Hawkeye asked quietly. “Wouldn’t you have given everything to save even one you didn’t have to lose?”

“And what if the one I lost grew up to be Hitler? There’s consequences we haven’t even considered!” 

Hawkeye looked down at the table. He pointed to the hemostatic gauze. “Can you imagine the consequences of Ernie Haskell not having lost all of his fingers to his John Deere? He’s still alive and kicking, but he’d be a lot less miserable if he had the rest of his right hand.” Daniel sighed. “You still have a choice,” Hawkeye continued. “For me, it was easy. I’d already seen too much death. We all had.”

“You’re interfering with what we’re destined to be.”

Hawkeye shook the unsettled feeling out of himself. “If there’s one thing I’ve learned in all this, it’s that there’s no such thing as destiny.”

“I just -you’re getting yourself so deep into all this - I don’t want to see you in trouble.” His hand gestured to the medical supplies, but his eyes were trained on the photo cube. What he’d intended as a way to get back in touch with his dad, let him know what he’d been up to, was rapidly turning awkward and painful, as though he and his dad were having completely different conversations. 

“Wait, do you think I stole this stuff for you?”

“No.” Suspicion narrowed his father’s eyes. “Did you?”

“Of course not. We haven’t gotten to the mountain of paperwork for you to sign and the charting they’d like you to send back. Healer T’Viri insisted.” He pulled out the datapad he’d planned to save for last. “They’re being very careful about what they give out. Incremental changes first, and things we can produce ourselves. And vaccines, to keep us from catching their diseases and vice versa.”

Daniel sat back and scrubbed at his hair. “It’s all a bit much for a quiet country doctor,” he said. His eyes drifted across the living room to Hawkeye’s old rocking horse. “I always knew I kept it for a reason, but I couldn’t have imagined that the next child to use it wouldn’t be - “ He stopped abruptly.

“What, Dad?”

He had decided that he wasn’t going to volunteer anything, but he wouldn’t lie to his father, not to a direct question. The carefully curated pictures in the photo cube didn’t give away more than he was ready to tell. He’d hoped there wouldn’t be any direct questions.

“Hawkeye,” his father said patiently, in the same voice he’d used when Hawkeye was a mischievous boy who knew how to talk himself out of trouble. “What are you doing? What is this?”

“This--” he gestured to the stuff on the table. “Is my job now.”

“You showed up here with an entire family in tow. A family you have no attachment to.”

“Dad.” Most things he could say would be true lies of omission. “If you didn’t want them to come, you could have told me in advance.” That was dirty pool, he admitted to himself.

“They’re lovely people, Ben. I just don’t know what you’re doing with them.” His voice grew both quieter and higher. “You are - you are a prize, you know that, son? You don’t have to settle for playing uncle in someone else’s family. You can - you will have a wife of your own one day, and children. I don’t know why you think the best you can do is be the third wheel on what appears to be a very well-balanced bicycle.

“What makes you think I’m settling for anything?” He wondered if this was the last conversation he’d have with his father and heard his own voice get tight.

“For a temporary arrangement, this sure seems awfully—comfortable. You’re not going to meet anyone this way. People will assume—I assumed—that you were with them because you couldn’t take care of yourself. Because something happened to you. Up there.”

Hawkeye’s laugh was joyless. “I got off easy compared to BJ and Peg.”

“And she seems fine now. So does BJ’s arm.” He sighed. “What are you going to do when they realize they don’t need you anymore?”

Hawkeyes stomach flipped. He followed his father’s gaze to his hands, which were twisting in his lap. “I guess I’ll deal with that when it happens.”

Daniel faltered, a flicker of confusion across his face. “You don’t want a family of your own?” he asked. “This is enough for you?” 

“More than enough.” Hawkeye looked to where Peg and BJ would come back from, if they didn’t just go off to bed.

Daniel searched Hawkeye’s face until Hawkeye could no longer bear the scrutiny and ducked his head to study the grain of the table.

“Oh, Ben,” his father said, a soft, painful ache in his voice. “You’re in love with her, aren’t you.”

“I love all three of them,” he said, evading just a little.

“She’s never going to leave him. That’s not how this works.”

“I would never do that to BJ!” he protested, jumping up out of his seat to pace the room. “Dad, I--” He buried his face in his hands. “Can I say one thing first?”

“What?”

“Dad. I love you. That won’t change no matter where you go, or where I go, or what you think of me. Okay. Now you can go on.” It wasn’t the best goodbye, but it would have to do if that was what this was. He blinked and swallowed, wrung his hands, and waited.

His father wisted in his chair to watch him pace. “What does that have to do with anything? Son, you think you’re the first man to ever fall for another man’s wife? That’s a tale older than you OR me. But of course, you have to take it to the extreme. Most men don’t move in and play house with their best friends and the women they covet! You’ve gotten yourself into a fine mess, here and I just - I don’t want you to get hurt. Or them. They seem like nice people, Ben. And they’ve been incredibly kind to you, I can see that. But how do you live like this?”

Hawkeye took a deep, steadying breath and fervently wished he had the power to psychically tell Peg and BJ to pick up Erin and sneak out the back door before the yelling really got started. He had to speak absolutely clearly, no matter how little he wanted to.

“I fell in love with BJ first.”

The realization that he could lose his license if his father wanted him to hit him like a rock in his gut. Would Daniel think he was helping? He wished he could recall the words. He wished he had just lied. He considered Healer T’Viri’s offer, which had been for all four of them, and how quickly it could be accomplished.

He couldn’t uproot Peg and the baby like that. Like his dad said, maybe this was how he would end up with nobody after all.

Daniel froze, the color withdrawing from his face, leaving his lips and eyes pale and lifeless. His throat worked as though he were trying to speak. “But he’s not,” he finally managed. “He’s married. He’s married to Peggy. You - “ he stopped. There was a long silence. Hawkeye gripped the back of a chair and swallowed, keeping his eyes fixed on his father. “This happened - during the war?” Hawkeye nodded. Daniel sighed. “Does he know?”

The unmistakable sound of BJ smothering a chuckle startled them both. Hawkeye’s answering laugh cracked out of his mouth, bordering on hysteria. “I should think so.”

He looked up to see BJ leaning against the doorframe, long and lean and golden, his arms crossed loosely over his chest. And even with all the thoughts jostling around in his head he couldn’t help but note BJ was an incredibly beautiful man. Daniel turned around to stare and then turned back to Hawkeye. 

“It’s crazy, isn’t it?” BJ said cheerfully. “Man goes to war, meets married man, falls in love with married man while the bombs fall around them.” The joking tone fell out of his voice with the next words. “Married man falls deeply, madly in love right back.”

“What about your wife?” Daniel blurted. 

“She’s wild about them both,” Peggy said, coming to join BJ in the doorway. “You’re right about him being a third wheel, Dr. Pierce. But it’s a tricycle we’ve got here. We need him, desperately. And he’s wonderful with Erin. She adores him.” 

“Just thought we’d mention that,” BJ added. “C’mon, Peg. It’s a beautiful night for a walk.” They left before anyone could speak. 

Hawkeye got to his feet and headed for the liquor cabinet. “I find it a little impossible that we’ve had this entire conversation without a drop of fortification,” he said lightly. “Scotch or brandy?”

His father had frozen in place, as though his brain failed to process the information it was given. He got out the scotch, poured a couple of fingers into two glasses, and placed one glass into Daniel’s hand, waiting.

Daniel took a shaky sip. Satisfied enough, Hawkeye downed his whole glass before he sat down. “I’d have drunk myself to death without them,” he said evenly. “It’s not even a question. They saved me from the end of the world.”

“Maybe this IS the end of the world.”

“It is, Dad. The end of our world, anyway.” 

His father looked down at the table full of futuristic medicine. Still silent. Brooding. “Dad?” Hawkeye said.

“Ben?” 

“How’s your chest feeling?”

“My chest?” 

“I’d like to tell you one or two more things, but I think I may have maxed out the amount of shock I can put you through for one night.” 

Daniel chuckled, and Hawkeye felt himself unspool. “Go ahead, son. It can’t be worse than seeing New York City get wiped off the map.” 

Hawkeye winced but nodded like he understood. “Our friends from the future understand better than we do,” he said. “We’re not...there’s more variety there.” 

“I’d assume there are relationships that emerge between the species, yes?”

“And they've struggled with that as much as we struggle with the idea of different races intermarrying. But they got over it. Are getting over it. More or less. They’ve got a century’s worth of tolerance on us. And think about how far we’ve come in a hundred years.” 

Daniel took another long swallow of Scotch. “Homosexuals, too?”

Hawkeye very carefully did not divulge classified information. “Yeah. And—other arrangements.”

“So we didn’t find a cure for it.”

Hawkeye pretended not to notice how much that stung. “Not hardly.”

Daniel stood up. “Fact remains, you live here. And now. Not in some utopian future. There will be consequences for all of you if you’re found out. Even for Erin.”

Hawkeye sobered. “We know. We’ve got it covered.” He wasn’t quite up to explaining how a planetary ambassador’s debt to them would buy them passage and refugee status. That would have to be a story for another day, after he figured out how much of it he was free to tell.

Daniel nodded in acceptance. “Well. It’s been a long night. I think I’m going to turn in.”

“We’ll be here in the morning.”

Daniel nodded again. Hawkeye held out his hand to take Daniel’s glass. Instead, his father clasped it, pulling himself out of the chair, giving Hawkeye the tiniest extra squeeze before releasing it and handing him the glass.

“Sleep well, son,” he said quietly. “If the baby’s up early, you can bring her to me and sleep in a little. Tell Peggy.” 

“She’ll appreciate that,” Hawkeye replied solemnly. Daniel nodded one last time, and, with one last look at Hawkeye’s childhood rocking horse, made his way to bed.


End file.
